"The Stairs and the Doorway"
About "The Stairs and the Doorway" is the first tale in the 1st episode of the 1st season of The Nosleep Podcast. It concerns a man finding an impossible basement underneath a college. Written by Eric Dodd, it has a running time of 25:33 and was read by David Cummings. it is the 1st tale overall on the podcast. Summary A young man describes his disadvantaged upbringing and his father's desire to send him to college, on the basis that he wants his son to have what he didn't have growing up. The family is disadvantaged, so the dean of a nearby university agrees to let the young man attend the school at a considerable discount provided that he keeps his grades up and works as a maintenence man. The man settles into his job, which is easy during the summer and autumn months. However, as late December rolls around, he finds himself at a loss of what to do when he is not working. After being given a ring of keys by an older worker, he decides to investigate a new room every night he works. Eventually, the man reaches the oldest building in the school. He spends his nights expolring some of the rooms until he comes to the basement, where he finds a small metal door behind the boiler. He finds a key on his ring that works and travels inside. In it, he finds a hallway with a door at the end. Opening this door reveals a set of stairs leading down. The man travels down them until he reaches a hallway lined with doors. Each door leads to an old, abandoned classroom or some other educational room. At the end of this hall is another set of stairs leading down. The man muses that it is impossible for that set of stairs to be there, due to the construction of the shcool, but goes down these as well. Each sucessive hallway reveals more disused classrooms and another set of stairs leading down. The man eventually reaches the bottom of the stairs, where he finds a huge, cavenrous room whose size is impossible to measure. Armed with only a flashlight for illumination, he makes his way across the room until he comes upon a huge metal door with an enormus locking mechanism on it. He finds a key that fits into the lock and manages to pull the rusty, dented door open. Some kind of creature, described only as having too many fingers and having wings, rushes out of the room behind the door and rips into the man. He drops his flashlight and is knocked out. When he awakens, he spends an unspecified amount of time crawling around in the dark, trying to find the door that leads to the stairwell. All the while he thinks he hears something moving around the room. Eventually, the man finds the door and crawls all the way back up the stairs. Dehydrated, injured, and disoriented, he emerges from the building three days after going in. Police are waiting and tell him that there have been several gruesome murders that fave occured on and around the campus. The police at first think of the man as a suspect, but quickly change their minds when they see the many injuries and messages carved into his flesh. He tries to tell the police about the creature and the door behind the boiler, but they find no door, even when the dig behind the bricks. The man reveals that the creature killed six more people the following week before sadly musing that the creature marked him as a friend for releasing it.Category:Tales Category:Season 1 Category:David Cummings Category:Eric Dodd